The fast track to elevating onboarding
Onboarding is a necessity at any organization, but it doesn’t have to be overwhelming or time-consuming. Common difficulties are usually connected to traditional methods: Outdated technology, siloed processes, and excessive manual work.
Older approaches create inconsistencies, culture imbalances, and skills gaps. Course content, resources, and data handled manually gets scattered, goes missing, or is incomplete. L&D teams lose valuable time filling gaps and putting out fires instead of setting new hires up for success. Misalignments and delays leave new hires feeling lost, unsupported, and unprepared. Or worse, onboarding backfires, causing talent turnover instead of increasing retention.
Using a centralized and flexible LMS like Absorb eliminates those scenarios. It simplifies your work by moving onboarding into a single system. Absorb LMS has AI-powered features and tools that help automate, personalize, and track onboarding to provide a seamless, end-to-end learning experience. Not only does it accomplish your onboarding objectives, it drives business impact for your enterprise.
The following guide walks you through five easy steps to launch a top-of-the-line onboarding program using Absorb LMS. It’s the roadmap you need to streamline and tailor onboarding to your company’s needs to improve new hire retention, engagement, and productivity.
Step 1: Unlock the power of an LMS for onboarding
The first step in your onboarding journey is simple, but powerful. The decision to use an LMS not only ensures a consistent, engaging, and impactful onboarding experience, it drives business results.
- Standardization across the board: Learners and leaders can count on a consistent experience for all, regardless of the trainer, training situation, location, and other factors
- Departmental coordination: everything centralized in one location, paperwork is eliminated, making the process visible, easing coordination and saving time
- Integration with other systems: Connecting your LMS to other workplace systems (e.g. HCIS) shares data effectively, optimizing resources and simplifying tasks for admins and users
An LMS is an absolute game-changer for new hire training. Automation capability and scalability reduces your administrative load, lowering costs. The ease of delivering programs translates into more effective programming for new recruits, helping them to acclimatize faster and better, reducing first-year turnover.
Built-in tools and processes simplify the deliver the 4 Cs of every successful onboarding program:
- Compliance: Teach and follow policies, rules, and regulations to build a culture of integrity, promote ethical behavior, and manage risks
- Clarity: Communicate clearly and provide simple, well-defined processes and expectations to increase efficiency, ease integration, and drive productivity
- Culture: Foster belonging and align values to inspire connection and motivation among new recruits, enhancing retention
- Connection: Build relationships to ensure that new hires feel connected to the team
Your LMS can help you build structured learning paths tailored to individual roles. They provide a clear outline of expectations and outcomes and track progress automatically. With customized learning paths, new hires are more deeply engaged, rapidly integrate with managers and teams, and progress to job functions quicker, with significant benefits for the business. An LMS also lets you add product-specific and process-specific training to the onboarding experience to boost productivity for additional business impact.
Step 2: Build your business case and get stakeholder buy-in
To transition your onboarding to Absorb LMS, you need stakeholder support. To get it, you need to build a business case showing how the business benefits from an LMS investment.
It’s not enough to focus on the challenges and drawbacks of manual onboarding. A well-developed business case identifies and quantifies the positive impact an LMS brings to the company. To gain support, demonstrate clearly to decision-makers how Absorb helps reduce first-year turnover and costs.
There are three sub-steps to gaining executive buy-in:
- Identify and understand current pain points: Talk to stakeholders across the business to gather insights and feedback. Interview broadly, speaking to HR and recruitment leaders, operational leaders, recent new hires, plus leaders from legal, IT, and accounting.
- Determine the economic benefit of onboarding on Absorb: Calculate and compare current labor costs from compliance and culture training and projected savings.
- Build and present your business case: Flex your PowerPoint skills as you build a compelling case for onboarding on Absorb LMS. Demonstrate how onboarding on an LMS addresses pain points and delivers a range of benefits.
Executives are concerned about administrative, training, and hiring costs. The faster your initiative can prepare employees for work, the higher your new hire retention rate, the better for the bottom line. Launching the program and demonstrating those impacts will come in time. Your job at this stage is to map out the possibilities, communicate them clearly, and support them with realistic cost projections.
As an example of what’s possible, explore and share examples of onboarding success stories. These companies significantly reduced administrative costs and increased learning engagement by leveraging Absorb LMS features and automations:
- Learnport centralized and automated training on Absorb to eliminate administrative burdens, onboarding 30,000 learners per week.
- Opswerks reduced onboarding time from three days to one with Absorb, easing the workload of administrative staff to focus on more strategic tasks.
- OTEC leveraged an LMS to build company culture, blending social features in its onboarding program
Step 3: Design your custom onboarding program
Onboarding is not one size fits all. Your onboarding program needs to work for your company. Start by identifying your program objectives and align them with core training topics to meet your specific audiences’ content needs. You’ll come away from this step with a content-audience matrix, a structured blueprint for your program launch that matches new hires with suitable corporate onboarding content.
Sample questions you’ll work through to identify people and content needs:
- Audiences and segments: Who are you onboarding?Are there groups with different needs, such as remote vs. in-office, full-time vs. part-time, or in different geographic locations?
- Compliance requirements: What are the policy sign-offs for each segment and role?
- Company overview: How will you introduce company vision, mission, values, organizational structure, products? Is there a welcome message from the CEO?
- HR essentials: How will you introduce new hires to HR procedures?
- Connections and culture: What meetings and courses will build connections for new hires and learn their values?
These details form the basis for content decisions. For some elements, such as company and product overviews, it makes sense to develop custom content. Tools like Absorb Create help you build out and tailor content through a user-friendly interface that supports multimedia asset integration. Make sure every element you incorporate is engaging, accessible, and accurate.
To save more time and lower production costs, you can also leverage extensive content packages within your LMS, often available in multiple languages. Absorb’s Amplify Max provides ready-made resources on essential onboarding topics, including basic IT and business skills, cybersecurity, leadership and development, diversity and inclusion, mental health and wellness, and workplace compliance. The right blend of build and buy reduces course design work, supports learning goals and gets people trained effectively faster.
Building a content matrix in your LMS is best practice for building an effective, engaging learning journey. It gives you an organized and structured method for determining essential topics and course requirements and matching them to specific new hires for completion. Charting out the onboarding journey before your implementation lays the groundwork for a seamless implementation with no training gaps.
Step 4: Automate and optimize with Absorb LMS
With your onboarding plan mapped out, you can turn your attention to setting up a functional and effective curriculum in your LMS. This is the time to configure the essential bells and whistles that keep your audiences engaged, achieving, and integrating with your business culture and processes.
Absorb LMS is designed to reduce course management time and make course content more engaging. Automation functions and setup options, such as scheduled reminder notifications, keep learners on track, help you monitor overall progress, and meet stakeholder reporting needs.
Leverage LMS features at every phase of onboarding to optimize program setup and delivery:
- Program administration: Add online courses and configure key options (learning objects, tasks, assessments, observation checklists, etc.) in the Absorb Administrative Experience; integrate onboarding with your HRIS system
- Instructor-led courses: Configure course structure and settings and manage self-enrollments and scheduling in Absorb Administrative Experience
- Curriculum: Easily bundle lessons into structured and customized learning paths and configure enrollment rules to meet your organization’s needs
- Engagement: Activate features that build company culture from day one
- Content creation: Use powerful AI tools like Absorb Create to simplify and streamline content creation and management
Building culture and connections is vital for onboarding and LMS platforms provide pre-built, easy-to-activate features to drive engagement and social learning:
- Culture-building interface: This is what new hires see from day one. The Billboards feature of Absorb Engage provides a space for attention-grabbing content that reinforces company values and aims
- Interactive leaderboards: Introduce healthy competition by letting learners earn points and get to know one another through completing courses and gaining competences
- Social learning: The Collaborations feature, also part of Absorb Engage, creates a dedicated space for learners to interact and ask questions spaces
- Community polling: Survey and poll features let you gather valuable feedback on team integration and programs to improve and fine-tune content
Once configured, these elements run automatically, reducing administrative work and delivering a more structured, organized, and supported learning experience to new talent.
Step 5: Track, measure and continuously improve
The last step is the most rewarding. Here’s where you see the results of your efforts over steps 1-4 and measure the impact of your LMS-based onboarding program. Understanding and communicating the ROI of your initiative proves its value to stakeholders and leadership. As an added benefit, you raise the profile of your L&D team, tying learning efforts closer to strategic enterprise goals.
Absorb LMS eases the measurement step by tracking learner progress metrics for you, then conducting automatic data analysis to evaluate program effectiveness. Quantitative metrics for financial improvements are critical, as are qualitative data to gauge cultural impact and engagement.
Key onboarding success metrics to focus on include:
- Reductions in first-year turnover: Calculate the savings given backfilling, recruitment, and termination costs
- Labor cost reductions: Calculate travel, training, and administration costs saved
- Reduced training times: Calculate the benefit of increased productivity, sooner
- Increased employee engagement: Track and measure utilization metrics such as logons, enrollments, and course completions, and gather feedback from surveys
- Improved skills development: Analyze performance indicators from surveys, reviews, and assessments
Built-in reporting and analytics on your LMS accelerate the assessment and evaluation process and keep stakeholders informed about learning and business outcomes.
Data-driven decision-making using your LMS can identify opportunities to refine and optimize training as you roll out new learning paths and scale your onboarding program to more users. Feedback and numbers highlight areas for improvement and guide you in refining and making best use of your resources when planning your next implementations.
Better onboarding leads to long-term success
Getting started with Absorb LMS is easy and straightforward, and the benefits are instant. Following these five steps swaps out your manual and inconsistent processes for centralized and automated capabilities. You’ll improve the onboarding experience, save resources, and deliver business impact from day one. Whether you are developing a brand new onboarding program or enhancing your current approach, Absorb’s features and functionality set you and your learners up for success.
Absorb’s newly launched Strategic Learning Playbook onboarding curriculum offers self-guided learning pathways designed to help you uplevel the strategic impact of onboarding in your company to demonstrate meaurable improvements to the metrics that matter most to the business.These curricula have everything you need—downloadable checklists and templates, ROI calculators, and a sample business case presentation—to get stakeholder support for your onboarding initiative and unlock Absorb LMS to engage learners, reduce turnover, and save costs.
Elevate your onboarding experience today with Absorb. Click for more information or contact us for a demo.
